5 ms·

I haven't heard anyone talk about this book in a long time. I read it while a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in the 90s (albeit not his course). I struggled

I haven't heard anyone talk about this book in a long time. I read it while a grad student at the MIT Media Lab in the 90s (albeit not his course). I struggled to understand its relevance even then. I think for many people that book was an introduction to ideas about multi-agent and distributed systems. I'd already had that and didn't feel the book added much to the discussion other than introducing the idea. Academia has fashions. I feel like agent based systems will have their day again, perhaps with each agent backed by a deep learning system. It'll be easier to reason about than "convolve all these deep learning systems in a giant impenentrable network". That may be good or it may be bad. Minsky is of course infamous for having killed neural networks for a whole generation of researchers. He lived long enough to see their resurgence, I wonder if he commented on that?

mtraven 4y ago
Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 (from 1991, and a response to the revival of connectionism that happened in the late 80s). I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now. Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be. For more of Minsky's thoughts on human intelligence, here's a recent book that collected some of his writings on education: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin-Minsky-on-Education https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin... (disclaimer: I wrote the introduction).
- ghaff 4y ago
  >My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. The success of machine learning/neural nets--in no small part because of the amount of computation resources we can throw at them--has really led to hogging the attention compared to fields like cognitive science, neurophysiology, and so forth. Work is certainly going on in other areas but I'm still struck that some of the questions that were being asked when I took brain science as an undergrad many decades ago (e.g. how do we recognize a face as a face?) are still being asked today. Given that ML is the thing that's getting the flashy results, it's not surprising it's the thing in a limelight--even if there's a suspicion that it maybe (probably?) only gets you so far without better understanding how learning happens in people (and other animals) and other aspects of thinking and intelligence.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    It's likely also the case that brains don't work the way LLMs do. After-all, we evolved to survive and reproduce in the real world, not generate text or images. I consider AI to be a kind of alien intelligence that approximates human intelligence in some ways, and supersedes it in others (where computing power can be fully leveraged such as AlphaGo being able to play itself a million times in a few hours).
- jerb 4y ago
  > I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. I suspect he'd react similiarly to Chomsky who in, a recent interview (MLST), was highly critical of LLMs as "not even a theory" (of what, i'm not sure... language aquisition? language production? maybe both) Minksy was more broadly critical of NNs because it wasn't clear how difficult the problems they solved actually were. Until we had a better measure of that, saying "I got a NN to do X" is kind of meaningless. He elaborates in this excellent interview from 1990, beginning at 45:00: https://youtu.be/DrmnH0xkzQ8?t=2700 https://youtu.be/DrmnH0xkzQ8?t=2700
- 4y ago

mtraven 4y ago

Logical Versus Analogical or Symbolic Versus Connectionist or Neat Versus Scruffy: https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 https://ojs.aaai.org//index.php/aimagazine/article/view/894 (from 1991, and a response to the revival of connectionism that happened in the late 80s). I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. This has been a methodological problem with neural net approaches for many generations now. Minsky was as much a psychologist as a mathematician/engineer – Society of Mind owed a lot to Freud. That style of thinking seems to have dropped by the wayside, maybe for good reasons, but it's also kind of a shame. I'm not sure what insights you get into the human mind from building LLMs, powerful though they may be. For more of Minsky's thoughts on human intelligence, here's a recent book that collected some of his writings on education: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin-Minsky-on-Education https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4519/Inventive-MindsMarvin... (disclaimer: I wrote the introduction).

ghaff 4y ago
>My guess is that he'd be critical, because while their accomplishments are pretty impressive on the surface, they do very little to explain the mechanics of how humans perform complex problem solving, or really any kind of psychological model at all, and that is what he was really interested in. The success of machine learning/neural nets--in no small part because of the amount of computation resources we can throw at them--has really led to hogging the attention compared to fields like cognitive science, neurophysiology, and so forth. Work is certainly going on in other areas but I'm still struck that some of the questions that were being asked when I took brain science as an undergrad many decades ago (e.g. how do we recognize a face as a face?) are still being asked today. Given that ML is the thing that's getting the flashy results, it's not surprising it's the thing in a limelight--even if there's a suspicion that it maybe (probably?) only gets you so far without better understanding how learning happens in people (and other animals) and other aspects of thinking and intelligence.
- goatlover 4y ago
  It's likely also the case that brains don't work the way LLMs do. After-all, we evolved to survive and reproduce in the real world, not generate text or images. I consider AI to be a kind of alien intelligence that approximates human intelligence in some ways, and supersedes it in others (where computing power can be fully leveraged such as AlphaGo being able to play itself a million times in a few hours).
jerb 4y ago
> I often wonder what Minsky would think about the current generation of AI. I suspect he'd react similiarly to Chomsky who in, a recent interview (MLST), was highly critical of LLMs as "not even a theory" (of what, i'm not sure... language aquisition? language production? maybe both) Minksy was more broadly critical of NNs because it wasn't clear how difficult the problems they solved actually were. Until we had a better measure of that, saying "I got a NN to do X" is kind of meaningless. He elaborates in this excellent interview from 1990, beginning at 45:00: https://youtu.be/DrmnH0xkzQ8?t=2700 https://youtu.be/DrmnH0xkzQ8?t=2700
4y ago